Thoughts on Art, Inspiration, Creativity and Spirit

Tag Archives: Pema Chodron

There’s a reason that you can learn from everything:
you have basic wisdom, basic intelligence, and basic goodness.
Therefore, if the environment is supportive
and encourages you to be brave
and to open your heart and mind,
you’ll find yourself opening
to the wisdom and compassion
that’s inherently there.
It’s like tapping into your source,
tapping into what you already have.
It’s the willingness to open your eyes,
your heart,
and your mind,
to allow situations in your life
to become your teacher.

Strangely enough,
even though all beings would like to live in peace,
our method for obtaining peace over the generations
seems not to be very effective:
we seek peace and happiness by going to war.
Maybe we come home from work and we’re tired
and we just want some peace;
but at home all hell is breaking loose for one reason or another,
and so we start yelling at people.

War begins when we harden our hearts,
and we harden them easily whenever we feel uncomfortable.
It’s so sad, really,
because our motivation in hardening our hearts
is to find some kind of ease,
some kind of freedom from the distress that we’re feeling.
We can do everything in our power,
but war is never going to end
as long as our hearts are hardened against each other.

When we think that something is going to bring us pleasure,
we don’t know what’s really going to happen.
When we think something is going to give us misery, we don’t know.
Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all.
We try to do what we think is going to help. But we don’t know.
We never know if we’re going to fall flat or sit up tall.
When there’s a big disappointment, we don’t know if that’s the end of the story.
It may be just the beginning of a great adventure.
Life is like that.
We don’t know anything.
We call something bad; we call it good.
But really we just don’t know.

When you open yourself to the continually changing,
impermanent, dying nature of your own being and of reality,
you increase your capacity to love and care about other people
and your capacity to not be afraid.
You’re able to keep your eyes open, your heart open, and your mind open.
And you notice when you get caught up in prejudice, bias, and aggression.
You develop an enthusiasm for no longer watering those negative seeds,
from now until the day you die.
And you begin to think of your life as offering endless opportunities
to start doing things differently.

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Hi! I'm Amy Crawley
I'm an award winning, published artist who finds meaning in making art. I teach a variety of polymer clay & mixed media classes and guide others to find meaning through creativity.
This blog is an expression of my encounters with art, creativity, imagination and spirit.